The treasure in obstacles on your path to love

After a bit of positive thinking and visualization, you may feel as though you really, really believe you have it all together this time. You are feeling more confident, more hopeful than ever and start putting yourself out there to meet the one. Then, something happens like a bad date or no responses on your profile and you feel like you are slipping backwards.

On a conscious level you felt so good and wonder why you lost your mental momentum. It is easy to think positive on the surface, but how you respond to your results in dating shows how you really feel about your potential for great love.

The reason people don’t reach their dreams in life is that they get discouraged when things aren’t happening fast enough or easily. Our society has been flooded with quick-fix schemes and the lottery mindset. The magical thinking in self-help industry gives the impression you can get rich, find love and lose weight without any conflict or personal effort.

You can create your life with your thoughts, but shifting the habit of thinking takes commitment and courage. Moving out of the comfort zone that you built around your life means facing the walls of security that you erected early on to survive. When things don’t show up easily, there is a tendency to blame outside forces and that keeps you right in your safety zone – being without a partner.

Thank goodness there are people who didn’t react to poor results and kept going. Thomas Edison endured over a thousand experimental failures before he invented the light bulb. Gandhi faced terrible resistance when he was liberating India from English rule. Of course, this is nothing compared to a few bad dates on Match.com, right?

You will always have resistance when you change your life. The resistance is actually necessary to build your mental muscle to prepare you for the next level of growth. If you don’t have resistance, you aren’t really growing at all. You are just swimming around your comfort zone and waiting for someone to come save you.

When you start moving toward something new, fears and unconscious beliefs will show themselves to you in the form of people, situations and even through your dreams. These obstacles are actually opportunities to see parts of your mind that were hidden from you when you were hiding out in your comfy-zone. They are there to show you where you stop so you can finally move past them.

You can think of these obstacles as doorways. You can either look at the door and say, “too bad it’s closed” and retreat, or you can open the door to see what the resistance is about so you can walk through it. Once you realize the gift of resistance, you will be excited when you reach a door instead of discouraged. You’ll want to find more doors!

Your unconscious mind is always showing you the way. You don’t want to clear away these obstacles with magic potions or healing. You want to open them up and receive their wisdom. When you realize that the real barrier to love is your own conscious will to move through the discomfort of change, you can be empowered to push through and find the gold.

Joseph Campbell said, “Where you stumble, there is your treasure.” See your stumbles in love as a message from the divine guiding you to what you want. The divine in you wants you to have love more than you want to receive it. Open your arms and heart and prepare to accept the gift of great love that is waiting for you.